ShieldDB

They are 4 core features that to me are essential for a managed database service to be competitive:

• Good provisioning

The instance created must be optimized to give the most hardware capacity to the database. The database needs to be properly configured, with all security feature enabled.

• Automatic backups

Backups need to be created at least once a day and securely stored in a safe place with redundancy in multiple data centers.

• Reliable monitoring

If something goes wrong, like to many concurrent requests or almost no more disk to store data, an alert has to be sent.

• Easy scaling

When the data grows, it must be easy to upgrade the instance memory or disk.

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My goal is to implement all of them in this order, and to start a beta program as soon as the provisioning is ready for production!

The first steps of development are now complete with the whole app structure finished and the landing page online.

Like most programmers, I started my database journey with MySQL, and learned how to use other type of database (Redis, MongoDB, ..) along the way.

At the start of the year I had to solve a programming challenge that needed the use of a graphical database. I did some digging and went with Neo4j as it looked like the most robust solution.

Spending days to properly configure an unknown database is cumbersome, and you always discover misconfiguration along the way, sometimes it can even be severe security flaws, or badly configured backup, always due to a lack of knowledge that is hard to overcome.

Today, most cloud companies like AWS or more recently DigitalOcean provide managed database for a premium, which let you go faster without having to learn all the system administration.

Neo4j popularity being fairly new the offer in managed database is quite limited and I felt like I could provide users with a more easy to use managed database tool.